Social Listening: What It Is and Why You Should Use It.

Already No one underestimates the importance of social media for any company’s marketing. Internet users—especially young people—spend a significant portion of their free time browsing social media, using it, among other things, to discover products or services through influencers, ask their friends for opinions on them, or even make online purchases. In this regard, understanding the sentiment of conversations surrounding your brand or detecting potential trends, the early signs of a crisis, or potential customers is essential for any business. In this post, I’ll explain how this is done through social listening and why it’s important for your brand. Let’s get started.

Before the advent of the Internet, when brands wanted to know what consumers thought of them, they turned to a research firm. The firm would develop a series of qualitative and quantitative methods to gather approximate information about what consumers might think and feel about the brand that had hired them.

This information was accurate and very valuable to marketing teams and decision-makers; however, there was a problem: to find out what people were thinking, you had to introduce an external element into the sample—the interviewer—who unintentionally skewed the interview.

But then the Internet arrived, and with it a two-way dialogue in which consumers and brands could talk to each other on an equal footing on what came to be known as social media. Through social media, these consumers voice complaints, opinions, or questions directly to brands, which can then be collected for analysis in a way that was previously unheard of: without interfering with the sample being studied. And this is perhaps the greatest significance of social listening.

Social listening involves monitoring conversations and mentions related to a specific topic of interest across various social media platforms and then analyzing them to gain insights into actions that can be taken to improve the user experience.

In this way, brands are able to understand in real time the online conversation about their brand, as well as about their products and services. To do this, it is necessary to constantly monitor what is being said and what people are talking about, thereby maintaining a continuous, accurate sense of the brand or the market.

This monitoring can be done manually by identifying brand mentions, relevant hashtags, competitor mentions, industry trends, or keywords; however, it is much more common to use one of the various technologies available for this purpose.

These technologies, through natural language processing—which is simply a branch of artificial intelligence that enables machines to understand language—go a step beyond simple social media monitoring. Social listening using one of these tools acts on the data it has collected, making it much more proactive than other systems, as it analyzes the data and provides insights that will help you make better, customer-centric decisions.

But when should you use social listening?

When to Use Social Listening

I’m sure you can think of a few uses. Here are the five most common uses for social listening. They are as follows.

1. SOCIAL REPUTATION MANAGEMENT

Every brand must set a target reputation and then act to provide its customers with an experience that is as close as possible to the reputation it wants to achieve or maintain. If the customers’ perceived experience differs significantly from the target reputation, an“experience gap” will result.

When this gap persists over time, what is known as a reputational crisis arises. And no brand wants that to happen. That’s why it’s so important to protect your social reputation and nip a crisis in the bud as soon as possible.

In this case, to manage your brand’s reputation, tracking and analyzing brand sentiment is a truly useful benchmark for evaluating that reputation. If sentiment toward your brand is declining, then something you’re doing isn’t aligning with the experience your customers expect, and as a result, your reputation is being affected. Brand sentiment analysis will give you an idea of what that is.

It’s also very important here to track and analyze the sentiment and engagement associated with specific keywords related to that crisis. Similarly, if you notice that positive sentiment is increasing, that will allow you to continue working along the same lines—and vice versa.

2. COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

This is another key reason why you should start using social listening. While looking at market share or rankings can help us identify our main competitors, our competitors on social media may be quite different. Social media can even help us identify potential competitors.

In addition, active listening on social media will allow you, as a brand, to find out what your competitors are doing and how they’re handling certain aspects of communication, customer service, and customer loyalty on different platforms.

This will help you learn about:

• If you have the best product.
• If you’re the highest-rated brand.
• If they are satisfied with your product deliveries.
• What is the shopping or service experience like?
• Where your company falls short, or in what areas you outperform your competition.
• What kind of market and audience do your competitors dominate?

By analyzing and monitoring what your competitors are doing on social media and how they’re doing it, you’ll be able to stay one step ahead and secure that all-important—yet elusive—differentiation that all brands are always seeking.

3. INTERACT WITH CUSTOMERS

Some of the best social media marketing campaigns have used social listening as a key part of their strategy. By listening to your customers and identifying who your brand advocates are—and, conversely, who your brand critics are—you can create conversations around them, giving you an opportunity to explain more about your business, your value proposition, or let your“brand lovers”or brand advocates take the lead, with your encouragement.

This conversation also shows that you listen to your followers and makes the relationship feel much more genuine, as well as strengthening the community you’re building around your brand.

By listening and taking action to address any issues a customer may have on social media, a brand can quickly turn a bad experience into an opportunity to raise its profile.

4. IDENTIFY AND MAKE BETTER USE OF YOUR INFLUENCERS

One of the major advantages of social listening is that it allows you to identify who the influencers are in your industry.

Keep in mind that these influencers are becoming increasingly important, since most consumers rely on them on social media when making a purchase decision about a product or service.

Once you’ve identified influencers, you’ll be able to monitor what they say about your brand or what they comment on regarding other brands similar to yours. This will allow you to proactively anticipate the questions others will have about your brand, ensuring you have a reliable answer.

5. IDENTIFY AND ADDRESS SKILL GAPS

Social media has become the place where many consumers vent their frustrations with purchases or brands. Through social listening, a brand can identify issues with the user or shopping experience—whether for customers or employees. If we identify through this process that a specific problem is recurring, the brand can take steps to resolve it as soon as possible and thereby minimize the experience gap as much as possible.

Knowing this in real time means you can work with the right, relevant teams to resolve the issue as quickly as possible.

These are perhaps the five most common use cases for social listening; however, it can also be used for purposes such as crisis management, customer service, content creation, marketing campaign performance, and research for business launches.

At MioGroup, we’re experts in digital marketing and have a large team of social media professionals and social media analysts who can help you take your business to the level your market expects. Want to talk?